Closed-Loop Polymer Upcycling by Installing Property-Enhancing Comonomer Sequences and Recyclability

The concept of upcycling postconsumer plastics into higher-value products is attractive, but the challenges remain to develop a cost-effective upcycling scheme, discover property-enhancing structures, and, most importantly, install recyclability into upcycled plastics to enable a circular lifecycle....

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Macromolecules 2019-06, Vol.52 (12), p.4570-4578
Main Authors: Liu, Xia, Hong, Miao, Falivene, Laura, Cavallo, Luigi, Chen, Eugene Y.-X
Format: Article
Language:English
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The concept of upcycling postconsumer plastics into higher-value products is attractive, but the challenges remain to develop a cost-effective upcycling scheme, discover property-enhancing structures, and, most importantly, install recyclability into upcycled plastics to enable a circular lifecycle. Reported herein is a convenient and effective strategy to upcycle polyester, exemplified by poly­(glycolic acid) (PGA), via transesterification (TEster) in bioderived, commercially available γ-butyrolactone (BL) that serves as both the solvent and comonomer, which generates sequence-defined copolymer poly­(GA-co-BL). Owing to the isolated glycolic sequence present in the copolymer created uniquely by TEster, it exhibits much-enhanced thermal stability (≥44 °C) over both homopolymers or copolymers without such sequences. This upconverted copolymer is chemically recyclable, enabling a complete recovery of pure glycolic acid and BL feedstocks.
ISSN:0024-9297
1520-5835
DOI:10.1021/acs.macromol.9b00817